Last week’s read and sees!

This week’s main article is brought to you by the Tabata Times. They contacted us and wanted to know what we were doing to prepare our athletes for the CrossFit Open and the CrossFit Games. This is an article we wrote for them.

Seeing that we had a real life Festivus pole here at 77, I thought it was appropriate to learn a little something from Jerry Seinfeld. This is a video about the process that Seinfeld uses to write a joke. The article uses the video to compare his craftsmanship to the craft of code writing. But some of Jerry’s craft also relates to CrossFit and the craft of weightlifting.

Think about it:

1. He looks for smooth transitions from point to point in the joke. Transitions are a major part of CrossFit, do you flow from the pull up bar to the push ups? How about the transition from the 2nd pull in the clean to the 3rd pull? It is as fluid and direct as possible or are there a bunch of unnecessary steps and movement?

2. He messes up and his note pad is full of junk that didn’t work. We can relate to this as coaches, we have lists of workouts and programs that just didn’t pan out the way we wanted. But we learn from each one and make the next plan better. As athletes, I know there are days upon days that my snatch looked and felt just plain wrong. Not every attempt or training session is going to be a thing of beauty. The attempt is what counts, we can always clean it up and make it better.

3. He worked on that Pop Tart joke for two years! Great things take time, as athletes and average joes looking to get into shape, we need to understand that excellence takes time. Work at it until it is perfect.